Challenging issues of identity in the art world

As an artist and a student of art history, senior Temitayo (Tayo)
Ogunbiyi is drawn to works that challenge conventional notions of categorizing
people by appearance, gender, nationality or other easily accessible
characteristics.

These themes of identity and classification infuse Ogunbiyi’s
senior thesis in the Department of Art and Archaeology, where she is completing
her major, and the Program in Visual Arts, where she is a certificate
candidate. Ogunbiyi is producing a written thesis examining the influence of
the 1993 Whitney Biennial, a controversial exhibition of contemporary art. She
also is mounting an exhibition of her original artwork — an eclectic collection
of some 40 paintings, sculptures and textile designs — that will run from May
2-9 in the Lucas Gallery at 185 Nassau St.

While grappling with questions of identity in her studio work,
Ogunbiyi focused her written project on how those issues were confronted by the
1993 Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

“The exhibition aimed to give artists a place to talk about
themselves and culture — topics that had almost become taboo with the Abstract
Expressionists and Minimalists, whose work became very cold and very much about
the artists taking themselves out of the work,” Ogunbiyi said.

“This exhibition was incredibly important conceptually because it
pushed culture, it pushed homosexuality, it pushed femininity, it pushed people
of color. It put all of them in the forefront and said, ‘Talk about your
American experience,’” she noted. “It was controversial because it marginalized
the white, heterosexual male; questioned the level of formal training
necessary; and painting, considered to be the staple visual art form, was
underrepresented and replaced by video and installation.”

Ogunbiyi interviewed artists and curators involved with the Whitney
exhibition, as well as current student artists, to better understand its
influence. She also delved into questions of how religion, spirituality and
alternative art forms were represented in the exhibition by artists such as
Kiki Smith and Byron Kim.

“Art history tends to organize itself in terms of chronology,
geography and/or nationality, but Tayo is interested in the manner in which
other categories or identity ascriptions — from race or ethnicity to religious
affiliation — explicitly or implicitly structure the way scholars, critics and
audiences see and understand the work of contemporary artists,” said Rachael
DeLue, an assistant professor of art and archaeology who is one of Ogunbiyi’s
thesis advisers.

“Her work considers both the overt and conscious as well as the
unconscious or surreptitious categorizations that define and propel the fate of
art in multiple contexts: institutions, the marketplace and the academy,” DeLue
said.

To prepare for her own exhibition, Ogunbiyi spent part of last
summer studying printmaking, photography, painting, sculpture and drawing at
Yale University’s prestigious Summer School of Art at Norfolk, as one of 26
participants from around the country. The Lower Gwynedd, Pa., native also
visited artists in Jamaica, her mother’s birthplace, and traveled to her
father’s home country, Nigeria, to learn basket weaving and techniques used in
creating traditional fabrics.

In her studio at 185 Nassau a few weeks before her exhibition,
which is titled “Extended Extensions,” Ogunbiyi offered a tour of her finished
pieces and works in progress. One painting depicted her forearms, twisted but
linked by an eye-shaped scar — a childhood wound that still marks her right
arm. Another painting featured portraits of a friend’s face in various sizes
and expressions. A hand-sized sculpture of a nose and mouth in abstract — one
of 22 such pieces she has made — sat in a jar on a work table. On another
canvas, swatches of denim were stretched and connected to create a cross
between painting and sculpture, one of many pieces incorporating elements of
different materials and art forms.

“I deal with fragmentation — fragmentation of materials,
fragmentation of my own body — and the ways in which there is a sort of a
healing process by piecing it back together in my own way,” Ogunbiyi said.
“That’s what is really interesting to me about trying to piece things back
together — they just never fit quite right, things are always left out, and
it’s a strange surprise how things come together in the end.”

“The artist is the one who has to mend the fragments for them to
make sense,” she said. “That’s something that’s always interested me, the
variety of ways in which you can connect ideas, concepts and materials to present
a certain point of view or articulate certain ideas to the viewer.”

DeLue said, “One of the things that I find most compelling about
Tayo’s studio work is its engagement with circulation systems: the way in which
products, ideas and images circulate in a global marketplace. … What Tayo says
about circulation in her art — that it isn’t seamless or neat and that it can
involve rupture, violence or misrecognition — speaks eloquently to the
difficulty, even perversity, of defining or knowing identity (national as well
as individual) in the 21st century.”

In addition to DeLue, Ogunbiyi worked closely with Greg Drasler and
Andrea Belag, lecturers in visual arts and the Council of the Humanities, as
well as other faculty members and professional artists and curators who have
visited Princeton to teach or give talks.

Ogunbiyi, who initially intended to follow a pre-med track at
Princeton before deciding to focus on art, said she has gained insights into
her studio work and art criticism through the variety of courses she has taken
at Princeton, particularly in the sciences.

“The ideas behind process and procedure have become really
important for me in terms of presenting certain concepts or grappling with
certain ideas,” she said. “The step-by-step way I conducted certain experiments
in my science classes informs how I approach my artwork and the questions I
have about visual arts and my experience. I don’t know that I would be thinking
through the work the way I do if I hadn’t taken those classes.”

This summer, Ogunbiyi will be an intern at the Studio Museum in
Harlem, working on outreach programs, while making future plans. She would like
to take classes in painting and sculpture at the Edna Manley College of the
Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and also is considering job
opportunities at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami or various artist’s
residencies. Eventually, she would like to run her own art gallery.